I will continue my course about agile methodologies at the University of Augsburg with both a Scrum and a Lean project simulation. The Scrum simulation will introduce the students to concepts like User Stories, Backlog, Iteration, etc. After doing lots of Gantt Charts, Use Case Diagrams etc. in the waterfall simulation, it's time now to … Continue reading Simulating a Scrum And a Lean Project In The Classroom
Category: Kanban & Agile
Back to the roots: Bridging the Deployment Gap
Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We've described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, … Continue reading Back to the roots: Bridging the Deployment Gap
Simulating a Waterfall Project In The Classroom
The first simulation in my course about agile methodologies will be waterfall style. Here's how I plan to do it. Before we go into the details of the waterfall simulation, I want the whole group (around 20-30 people) to come up with requirements for the product to build: an online office suite (maybe the most … Continue reading Simulating a Waterfall Project In The Classroom
Kanban vs. Iterative Development
Agile methodology builds on the concept of iterations - time boxes - in which you create a piece of working software. Each iteration starts with a planning meeting where the team takes stories from the backlog and commits to the sprint goal. If you use a tool like Pivotal Tracker, you even get emergent iterations … Continue reading Kanban vs. Iterative Development
Waterfall, SCRUM and Lean Software Development simulation as teaching platform
Currently, I'm preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb … Continue reading Waterfall, SCRUM and Lean Software Development simulation as teaching platform
Giving up – or not?
"Never give up" is an advice we hear far too often. We're taught that giving up is a failure. But nothing could be further from the truth if we're caught in a dead end. If there is nothing left to reach, why should we bother to go on? It's a waste of time and energy … Continue reading Giving up – or not?
Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked. Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially … Continue reading Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
Instead of motivating our teams, we should simply stop de-motivating them. Everyone you work with is highly motivated by default. But, bad information policies, countermanding orders or simply ignoring ideas will turn a highly motivated team member into a disgruntled road block. Open Communication Highly skilled team members are able to deal with the truth. … Continue reading Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
“Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
It's a very important thing for any agile team to find a definition of Done, which fits the expectations and the environment of the current development. For User Stories, I definitely prefer Done = Released as the most helpful metric. Only if a story is really out there serving users can you truly forget about … Continue reading “Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
A Kanban Board for Features
We're using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It's great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We're really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we … Continue reading A Kanban Board for Features
